Resources

Conference Activities

Midwinter 2015

Sunday, February 1, 2015 - 10:30am to 11:30am, McCormick Place West W176b

At the ALA Midwinter Meeting, LITA User Experience IG will have the following three 10-min. presentations and Q&A (5 min) after each presentation at the LITA UX IG meeting. We will also have discussion time for any UX topics on-site. If you have any UX-related topics you would like to discuss, please bring them with you!

Usability and Accessibility in Libraries: The Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure

-Jim Tobias, the Trace Center, University of Wisconsin

Accessibility and usability are highly intertwined. A website that is designed to be highly usable has a high chance of being accessible as well. However, some patrons with disabilities need access to additional features or assistive technologies (AT). Managing usability and accessibility together is the most effective and efficient approach. In this session, we will present the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII; www.gpii.net ). The GPII’s cloud architecture allows any patron to use built-in operating system features for enhanced usability, and AT as needed, without significant staff assistance or expense, while preserving library network security. Using the GPII, patrons can explore various accommodations, and carry their needs and preferences across multiple information and communication technologies. We will demo the Library-GPII-System (LGS), a library-focused implementation of the GPII that will be piloted in public and university libraries beginning in March 2015. The LGS aims to provide library access to patrons without disabilities, without posing any security or disruption risks to libraries' information technology networks. The LGS is being developed by Raising the Floor Consortium members (www.raisingthefloor.org) as part of a US Department of Education grant.

I, as a digital user experience librarian, conducted an experiment with one of the instructional librarians at my institution in order to investigate the intersection between user's web behavior and library instruction. We thought that library instruction plays a key role in web usability and affects the ways students behave on the library website, yet very little research has combined these two realms. During instructional sessions, freshman students were asked to perform a series of information seeking tasks on the library website both prior to, and immediately after, instruction. A usability tool - Verify - recorded individual student use of the website during the completion of each of these tasks. We'd like to share the results we found. The results allowed us to investigate how students behaved on the library website to complete the tasks and how the steps demonstrated by the librarian during instruction strongly influenced how students completed the tasks afterward.

A/B Testing in Library Emails

-Amanda L. Goodman, Darien Library

Email is not dead -- in fact, your library's emails are delivered to your patrons' inboxes more than 90% of the time while Facebook continues to diminish how many of your followers even see your content. The trick then is to get your patrons to open your emails and then interact with the content in a way to drive value for your library. At Darien Library, we are using A/B testing to discover how to design email newsletters that get opened and acted upon. Our most recent test of changing a subject line generated 10% additional opens. Then by adding a digital service to an email, we increased usage of the service by 151%. In this short session, Amanda will go over some of the metrics you can test for in your email campaigns. She will be focusing on MailChimp, but other email campaigns also offer insights on how your users interact with your library's emails.

Origin

The User Experience Interest Group was established in 2014.

Get Involved

Interest groups are open to all LITA members. Conference attendance is not required. To join a group, contact the chair, attend meetings and get involved with their activities and discussions. See contact information in the above roster by logging into the site and clicking your browser refresh button. If you need help, contact the LITA office at lita@ala.org.